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Side by side with the present-day tendency in psychiatry to emphasize the interpretative phase of mental disease rather than the descriptive one, there has grown up a strong movement towards a delineation and elaboration of the mental substratum, of the soil if you please upon which mental disease develops. This is naturally more particularly the case with the so-called functional mental disorders, but it is true to a certain extent also of those diseases which have a more or less well denned anatomico-pathological basis. Take for instance alcoholism, a pure intoxication of the central nervous system.
A mere diagnosis of alcoholism may be a sufficient diagnosis from a purely practical point of view, but it is unquestionably an incomplete diagnosis from a scientific point of view — the only point of view which promises further advance in our knowledge of medicine. A diagnosis of the latter type would be first of all exquisitely individualistic, it would take cognizance of alcoholism as it relates to the particular individual under consideration, it would be based upon a research into the whys and wherefores of not only the specific causative agent of this disease, but also of the particular mode of development, type of reaction and expression which the disease had assumed in the particular patient under consideration. This method of research, however, has reached its highest development, thanks to the psychoanalytic school, in the functional disorders, and here the craving for more enlightment has embraced, aside from a thorough search into the meaning of symptoms, a diligent and already quite fruitful exploration into the underlying soil which gives birth